Gender segregation in employment contracts

Abstract

This Paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EU countries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are overrepresented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects women’s preferences and their need to combine work with childcare, in southern Europe part-time jobs are often involuntary and provide significantly lower job satisfaction than full-time ones. Women are also over-represented in fixed-term contracts in southern Europe, and again this job allocation cannot be explained by preferences or productivity differentials between the two genders. There is thus a largely unexplained residual in the gender job allocation, which may be consistent with some degree of discrimination in a few of the labour markets considered, especially in southern Europe.